Take my Client….Please!
Good morning, fellow coaches. As promised, I’m following up in this blog with more rules for the game of targeting the right clients for your practice. Rule number one, you recall, was:
Target a market where you have a genuine level of interest.
Here’s rule number two:
Target your desired client, not just any client who will sign with you.
What I mean is this: getting more clients is (relatively) easy; getting more of the right customers requires more effort, but the payoff is astronomical to you. What’s the “right” customer? It’s someone who is highly coachable, in an industry where you have your greatest knowledge and success, who understands the process and long term nature of transformational coaching, and is in agreement with your fees and your value. Wouldn’t you want more clients like that? Of course you would.
How do you determine what this “ideal client” looks like? You apply the Pareto Principle to your client list, asking, “Which segment of my client list delivers 80% or more of my business?” There’s your ideal client. There’s the nugget of real value among the fools gold of the business community.
You say, “But I want more clients of any type, high-maintenance or not. In fact, I feel bad about categorizing some of my clients into the less that ideal category.”
Really? Do you realize that you’re refusing to do something that actually got you hired as a coach to begin with? Didn’t every one of your current clients make a decision that you stood out among all the other coaches that had prospected them? Weren’t you more than glad to help them realize how unique you were, in order to get their business? If course. All I’m asking you to do is apply the same process to your own business. You’re worth that, aren’t you?
Of course, you can simply run your practice so that you go after any and every client, if you want to. You may soon have the biggest book of business you can imagine, but like the comedian Henny Youngman trying to give away his wife, you may also be calling up your other coaching friends in a few months saying, “Take my client…please!”
As always, if you have any stories or questions to share, I’d love to hear them!
Joe Pursch
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